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ZenKimchi

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Posts posted by ZenKimchi

  1. You hit it right on the head.

    I want to like the show. It's the contrived bits and the "camp rats" stereotypes (as in, "Dude, let's get some X-Treme Fajitas and Mountain Dew and surf out of an airplane") that actually take the fun out of it.

    They stopped eating pie to go around town to get ingredients for ice cream.

    Nothing stops me from eating pie.

  2. I searched through eight pages of search results under "embarrassing" and couldn't find one about embarrassing experiences in restaurants.

    Last night, I went to a galbi restaurant with my girlfriend, Eun Jeong. It was one of the restaurants where we sit on the floor. While we were waiting for our galbi to cook at our table, one of the waitresses approached Eun Jeong with an apron and talked in a halting way.

    Turned out that I had been inadvertently mooning the whole restaurant.

    I usually catch things like that. I must be getting old, having to wait until the waitstaff bring it to my attention and then drape an apron around my offensive butt crack.

    After dinner, we went for a walk. I said to Eun Jeong that I am becoming a forgetful old man...

    "You know, I'm one of those old men who goes outside and forgets to zip his pants."

    Eun Jeong looked down.

    "Joe, your zipper's open."

  3. Yeah, that's funny. Last time I had it, my girlfriend laughed when I said, "Your intestines full of intestines now?"

    I don't think the filling is the cow's last meal. Chitlins are washed and washed and washed before cooking. I think the filling I see in my gobchang is the substance they make tofu from before it gets formed and pressed.

    I'm really glad you liked it. That price was very steep, too. But gobchang gwi is one of the moderately pricier dishes that I go out for. It's around $10 to $12 a person in my area.

  4. Yeah, I've watched a few of their episodes, and even though I found their ideas interesting, the presentation had me rolling my eyes. It would be more fun if they just cut the "stoner dudes going camping" act and just present their concepts.

    "Kick the Can Ice Cream" was a perfect example of where the "plot" made them look like morons. They wanted ice cream to go with their rhubarb pie. So they had the idea to make ice cream in a coffee can. They went to the trouble of visiting a farm to buy eggs, but the farmer wasn't allowed to sell them milk. So they went to a local store to buy milk.

    Um, DUH, they coulda bought a half gallon of ice cream while they were there, ya think? Is "kick the can ice cream" so fabulous that you want to waste your entire day making it instead of just grabbing some vanilla from the freezer case?

    That has to be some major stoner cravings.

  5. Lot's of good ideas, folks. I've never seen that chicken (game hen) roasting toaster oven at the store, but it would be cool if it was sold at a brick-and-mortar place. I try to avoid using Costco in my blog because most foreigners that I target as my audience do not have convenient access to it (it's cheating).

    I like that camp oven. There's a camping supply market in Namdaemun. There may be an off chance of finding it there.

    Again, I'm trying to figure out the thermodynamic difference between using an oven with the element on the bottom and using something like, yeah, a stock pot on a stove with dry heat. I still want to do my experimentation with this.

    And I guess I have too much time on my hands.

  6. Well that's just it. There *ISN'T* anywhere else to go if you want to eat grilled meat on your own. If you're by yourself, you have to settle for a bowl of soup for your dinner. Or kimbap.

    I guess that's why I've lost so much weight.

  7. I actually got off my butt and went to the Chili's web site. The big margarita is the "El Nino." Herradura Reposado tequila, GranGala, Cointreau and fresh orange juice.

    Yeah, I remember having to squeeze fresh orange wedges in the drink. It also has 2 oz. of alcohol, where the others have 1.5 oz. Goes very well with the Mushroom Jack Fajitas and the Chipotle Blue Cheese Burger (if that's still around).

    One of the cool things about that Chili's job I had was that it was a new restaurant opening. They brought these guys in from Orlando to teach us how to flip and juggle bottles and accurately pour blindly. The big thing was for two nights they had us taste EVERY SINGLE THING on the menu.

    One girl threw up from overeating.

  8. Edited again: I recently saw Alton Brown use a dutch oven without coals on a gas grill, lid closed, for a quickbread recipe. That may be an option as well.

    It was from watching that where I got the idea. Thanks, though. I guess it was a fool's errand. I thought that if Alton can smoke a salmon in a cardboard box, there had to be a way to roast a chicken on the stove top.

    The trouble with toaster ovens in Korea is that it's hard to find one with a temperature setting. The most advanced thing I've found has been one that controls which element heats up.

    And convection ovens -- kinda hard to find in a country where regular ovens are not common.

  9. It's highly frustrating in Korea, and I'm hoping the attitudes here will change. There are many places -- most places with a grill or any really good food -- where they WILL NOT serve solo diners. I think it's an economics thing because the only way to justify the cost of all the side dishes they put out is if at least two people are ordering.

    I hate to say this, but this was one of the first things I thought about when considering moving in with my girlfriend -- "Ooh, I'll have someone to eat dinner with!"

  10. A few years ago, a good friend sent me a set of Sam Adams Triple Bocks (heh, a box of bocks). For two years, I slowly worked through the bottles, along with other beer connoseiur friends.

    In the end, the most I could do was midly tolerate it. It tasted like a burned soy sauce. As much as I tried, I could not develop a taste for it. It did work okay in cooking.

    Was I missing something?

  11. When I lived in Germany (1992-1993), I remember a few beers being served in labeled glasses, particularly Bitburger. I wish I had half a mind to collect some glasses. Instead, we were more into the cardboard coasters.

  12. I can see in your photo something sludged heavily with mayo and ketchup. What was it?

    Great eye for detail. In the back of my mind I thought someone would ask that. I'm trying to remember. I think it was Tangsuyuk (Sweet and Sour Pork) with ketchup-mayo-drenched cabbage.

    That's the thing with many Korean hofs and restaurants who get their hands on Western ingredients. They haven't grown up with them, so they don't have the instincts that we have with them. It's like a three-year-old in the pantry.

    "Look Mommy! I made a ketchup, cheese, and strawberry jam sandwich. Just for you!"

    Seriously. I have had sandwiches not too far from that concoction.

  13. I've posted in other threads that I've recently gotten hooked on Korea's soju cocktail trend. They're simple highballs with soju, a mixer, and Sprite. Most of them are, at least. I keep hearing about this mythical cucumber soju I gotta try.

    The most interesting and addicting one I've had and made so far is yogurt soju. Like I said, it's built like a highball with soju, drinkable yogurt, topped with Sprite (Chilsung Cider in Korea). It's served in a used baekseju bottle, and everyone pours each other a shot -- KOMBAE!! -- and down they go until the next shot immediately following.

    IMGP2655-723266.JPG

  14. I was taught that at bartending school, but we called it a "Screaming Blue Motherfucker."

    At my favorite bar in Korea, I showed the bartenders how to make it. It quickly became popular, and I had free drinks for almost a year.

    Chili's Margaritas

    I bartended for a while a Chili's. I don't remember the names of the drinks, but I remembered there were some killer margarita combinations in the bunch. The one they gave you was the one that the waitrons and bartenders are told to push. And, yeah, it's good, and the shaking tumbler gives it a bit of theater, like the sizzling fajitas.

    But there's one margarita on the menu that would kick your ass. I don't remember the name, again, but it was named after some type of storm. Not a Hurricane. Not a Typhoon. I don't remember. It was stacked with more alcohol than any other margarita, and it was mostly top shelf stuff, like Grand Marnier instead of Triple Sec.

    As much as I hate corporate T.G.I. McChilibee's restaurants, I was impressed with how tightly the Chili's system was run and how everything from the booths to the lighting to the bartending and waiting styles were thoroughly thought out -- planned -- to relax the body and excite the senses.

  15. Ovens in Korea are an afterthought -- like an indoor grill in America. I haven't lived in an apartment with an oven here. I'll finally be buying one later this year, but many ex-pats are in my situation. I never realized how much we depend on ovens in Western cooking. I have all these great recipes, but I skip to the next recipe as soon as I see "Preheat oven to 350."

    I've been experimenting a bit with mimicking an oven on the stove top. I know that the Dutch oven was originally just that -- an oven. So I'm working on how to reliably make oven recipes.

    I've been using a large stock pot with a grill on the bottom to suspend the food. Last year, I roasted a chicken in there. It tasted great, but it was more steamed than roasted.

    Has anyone done this successfully? Any food science junkies have recommendations to improve on this?

    I'd like to do more successful experiments to put on my web site.

  16. Gobchang -- one of my favorite foods

    Intestines are your friends.

    Monday was Teacher Appreciation Day. My girlfriend was in a good mood, and she knew that I had been begging to go out and enjoy grilled food on a mild spring evening. She asked, "What do you want to eat? We can go anywhere you want."

    My evil mind started working. I was thinking of all the forbidden possibilities.

    "Gobchang Gwi? Could we do that?"

    "If you say so."

    I've had gobchang a few different ways, including gobchang bokkeum (stir-fried with gochujang) and jangol (which is more like a stew). My favorite way is gobchang gwi -- grilled in a pan with onions, potatoes, and lots of nasty bits.

    It is the ultimate man food.

    My girlfriend -- I'll remind you she is Korean -- was hesitant when she ate it. She had never had them grilled before. But the next day she was craving more.

    There's a great little restaurant in Ansan, south of Seoul, that grills them and flambees them with soju. They also serve raw liver and blanched tripe. The tripe is like eating condoms. But the raw liver is a major rite of passage for any serious foodie.

    The intestines in gobchang gwi are stuffed with something like tofu and big cloves of garlic.

    I used to live in the Sillim neighborhood of Seoul, which is known as the sundae and gobchang capital of Korea. They have these humongous restaurants serving up sloppy gobchang bokkeum where businessmen knock back sojus and wear pink aprons to protect their suits.

    Ack... gotta go back to work now. I did a bit about it on my web site with video.

    Gobchang Kui -- The Beauty of Grilled Intestines

  17. Excatly, Nakji.

    Korean bakeries, in my opinion, go to the extreme in sanitized cleanliness in bakeries. Almost everything in my local bakeries is hermetically sealed in plastic packages. In America, we can buy bread at the bakery and have it just wrapped in some paper.

    I forgot what my point was.

    I guess it may be reversed when Koreans come to America and see all the bread in bakeries lying out in the open getting stale.

  18. and then there is the Buckhead Diner in Atlanta which serves some very elegant dishes: homemade potato chips with warm Maytag bleu cheese, calamari, mile high Banana Cream Pie, veal meatloaf ... a very upscale and popular destination!

    Buckhead Diner -- very recommended. My little brother is a chef in Atlanta and used to work at the Buckhead Bread Co., across from the Buckhead Diner. He knew the head chef there and had lots of respect for him. The fried chicken there is marinated in raspberry vinegar and is the best fried chicken I've ever had.

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